AMONG THE BOOKS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXIII, Issue 117, 18 May 1892, Page 2

AMONG THE BOOKS.

(From tho " Ofcago Witness.")

"Frank Wei ton'a Luck ;or Off to New Zealand." By Thos. Cottle. Auckland : H. Brett.

We read the first few chapters of this book from a sense of duty and a conscientious desire to do justice to a colonial author, whose preface intimated that his aim was to realistically and faithfully depict station life in New Zealand ; we read the balance without rising, because we liked it. The writer haß very sensibly woven his description of the phase of colonial life to which he refers into a narrative, ostensibly autobiographical, which has the merest thread for a plots, it is true, but which successfully augarcoats bho pill he desires to administer. Nob that the story itself is altogether uninteresting. Id is a page or so from the lives of a number of commonplace persons, who are animated with the same passions, moved by the same desires, as the people whom we meet every day, and ib has for its basis the old, old story—old aa the lulls, unvarying in its general features, and yeb to each one who enacts ib over again, having something which none of the others over possessed. Nor is there lack of that literavy dexterity which sometimes charms the reader and draws him on from page to page in search of now beauties. Some good descriptive "bits" thero are, some fair power of narrative, as for instance the doscription of an up-country race meeting in tho North Island, while the Wanganui Cup ia won by an outsider euphoniously christenod. Dnt-and-go-ono, which is really an excellent one, and the dramatic : incident in the church which precedes the fall of the curtain on virtuo triumphant, and vico dragged off to morited punishment, which is the goal where all good stories—and plays, according to Miss Kemble—ought to end. Tho author has resisted the temptation to overload his work with colour, and compensates himself by going into minuteness of detail, which may seem to hamper the story, bub certainly justifies his claim to tidelity. The story may be briefly described without destroying the interest for the reader. Tho hero finds himself in England, unable to follow an academical career, being more addicted to outdoor sports than to study; so .it is decided to ship him off to the colonies. This was ia the early days, when it was a popular superstition at Home that any person- unfitted for the ordinary pursuits of life would do for the coloni6B provided he could ride a horse. The disagreeable voyage out i 3 minutely described and the characters introduced.. They duly land at Auckland—the year is 186b—and separate ; our hero to go southward to Taranaki, his* chum to hang about town to fall to tho position of horse-coper, bo join the Forest Rangers, be wounded seriously, tended during hia hospibal sicknesu by his faibhful ladylove, and bo leffe a legacy and become happy and virtuous ever afterwards. The he.'o enters the service of his uncle, who bus a catble station in Taranaki, and has two charming half-casts daughter?, and the impressionable young fellow incontinently Mis in love with one of them.- The path of love is crossed by the villain, who is ultimately stripped of his borrowed plumes jusb in time. The work at the station ia minutely described. Horsebreaking, cattle-mustering, pig-sbicking, campiDg oub, and all the other incidentals of colonial life are described in debail, as well as an episode in the Maori war, which Melton engages in that he may escape the torture of seeing his beloved cousin possessed by another. This is well done, because in it is observable some self-re-straint where the temptation to write sensationally must have been strong. The author could easily have made himself the hero of any quantity of stirring encounters with the Hauhaus, but he does not—he simply describes a short raid, and does ib so as to give an idea of Maori warfare. He also depicts a sharebroking fever, caused by the rich discoveries at the Thames goldfields.

The work, on the whole, is just such a one as we should expect to find written up by some person who had been entrusted with another's woll-kepfc diary, and who had never strayed beyond the limits of his text. Such a writer would produce a record and description upon which implicit reliance could be placed, though probably ib might be Bomewhat deficient as a novel. Such a result has been achieved by the writer of " Frank 'Melton's Luck."